RE: Ben Woods

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RE: Ben Woods

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estebanana

Posts: 9358
Joined: Oct. 16 2009

RE: Ben Woods (in reply to Mark2)

Ricardo,
Yes all of that. The two dancers who debuted with Ben in his flametal show were Melissa Cruz and Fanny Ara. They were both working a lot with Jason and Ben at the time. I’m old buddies with both of them.

My times with Ben were funny, lots of trash talking and drinking after gigs. We went to the same bars as all the other flamenco people. Ben and I lived in the same live/work studio complex so he was down the hall from me for 4 years, at the time he was putting together the flametal concept. He practiced constantly, he was doing metal rock technique and mixing it with flamenco. I’d often pass by his door in the morning and we’d both be waking up with coffee in hand, but he’d be sitting at his table with the guitar.

I never thought of Ben as having mechanical aptitude, he really had very little awareness about what guitars were and how they worked. He brought his guitar over to my shop and asked if I could figure out why it sounded thin and crappy. He went back to his apartment and left it on my bench. I looked it for a minute, loosed the strings and slid out the saddle. It was rounded over poorly, like a pointy canine tooth. I eased off the top of the saddle, polished it and tuned back up. It took 15 minutes I think. I called him, he walked down the hall and picked it up. ( free fix)

He was very happy and the guitars voice was meaty and solid, truer. He was surprised that it made that much difference to round the saddle properly. But he still didn’t have a mechanical feeling for things. Forward from 2002-2004 to 2014 when he was starting to work with his own line of development that would become the Nylo-caster, an electric guitar, his sense for hand work and set up scrutiny had changed. He was on the way to assembling and adjusting the guitars he was selling under his brand.

At this point my fondness for him grew because I felt he’d crossed over into being a real luthier and we could have dialogue about guitars from a makers perspective. This is what saddens me most about his passing at an unfairly young age. We had been more or less drinking buddies on occasion who were both steeped in all kinds of flamenco, strive to understand old and newer stuff, but it was to me joyful that we’d grown into colleagues in guitar making and I was looking forward to seeing how far he would go.

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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Oct. 9 2023 20:41:49